Forward Deployed Researcher Director (Data as a Service)

Role overview

Director, Forward Deployed Researcher (Data as a Service)

Snorkel AI is hiring a Director for the AI Solutions Engineering, DaaS team. This is a player-coach role where you lead a team of AI Solutions engineers, set technical standards, and partner with sales and cross-functional stakeholders. You will also engage directly with frontier AI research teams and act as an escalation point for complex customer situations.

Key missions & responsibilities

• Recruit, hire, and develop the AI Solutions team; coach on:
  • technical quality
  • customer engagement
  • career growth
• Set and maintain the technical bar for:
  • specifications
  • evaluation frameworks
  • customer deliverables
• Lead technical conversations for select strategic accounts, including:
  • scoping and solution design
  • collaboration/partnership with frontier AI research teams
• Serve as an escalation point for complex customer needs and technical challenges

Requirements

• 8+ years in applied ML / AI solutions engineering, technical presales, or research-intensive customer-facing roles
• Experience operating against revenue or pipeline goals in a GTM organization
• Comfort working in a fast-moving environment with ambiguity and rapid iteration
• Strong communication and coaching ability; credible partnership with:
  • sales leadership
  • frontier AI researchers
• Proven track record hiring and developing technical talent
• Strong expertise in frontier AI, including:
  • LLMs
  • training data pipelines
  • evaluation methodologies
  • post-training techniques: RLHF, DPO, RLAIF
  • domain areas such as coding agents, reasoning, multimodal models, or RL environments
• B.S. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related field
• 5+ years managing/leading technical ICs, ideally in a presales or solutions engineering org

Nice-to-haves

• Experience specifically collaborating with frontier AI research teams on real customer deliverables